The top 25 hedge fund managers made last year over
$24 billion. This is enough to pay the salaries of
more than 425,000 public schoolteachers.

By Bernie Sanders
Senator from Vermont

March
29, 2014 "Information
Clearing House -Madam
President, as the longest serving Independent in the
history of the U.S. Congress, I wish to address an
issue which I believe does not get the kind of
discussion it should from either political party but
certainly not from our Republican colleagues--the
moral, economic, and political dimensions of the
kind of income and wealth inequality which we have
in our country today. In my view, this is the most
important issue facing the United States because it
impacts on virtually every aspect of our lives. It
is an issue we must be discussing thoroughly and one
in which the American people have to be engaged.

The fact is
that while we often speak of the United States of
America being the wealthiest Nation on the face of
the Earth, that is only partially true, because
within the context of total wealth is the reality
that the great middle class of this country is
disappearing. The reality is we have more people
living in poverty today than at any time in the
history of the United States of America. The fact is
we have by far the highest rate of childhood poverty
of any major industrialized nation on Earth. So if
we add it all together, yes, we are the wealthiest
Nation on Earth, but the reality is the people on
top own a huge amount of this wealth while the
middle class is shrinking and poverty is increasing.

I will
speak to our colleagues and the American people
about some of the realities in terms of income and
wealth distribution.

Today the
top 1 percent owns 38 percent of the financial
wealth of America. I wonder how many Americans know
how much the bottom 60 percent owns. I want people
to think about it. The top 1 percent owns 38 percent
of the financial wealth, and the bottom 60 percent
owns 2.3 percent. One family in this country--the
Walton family, the owners of Walmart--are now worth
as a family $148 billion. This is more wealth than
the bottom 40 percent of American society. Today the
richest 400 Americans own more wealth than the
bottom half of America, 150 million people. This is
distribution of wealth--what we own.

The latest
information we have in terms of distribution of
income is from 2009 through 2012, which says that 95
percent of all new income earned in this country
went to the top 1 percent. When we talk about
economic growth--2 percent or 4 percent, whatever it
is--it doesn't mean much, because almost all of the
new income generated in this growth has gone to the
very wealthiest people in this country. The top 25
hedge fund managers made last year over $24 billion.
This is enough to pay the salaries of more than
425,000 public schoolteachers. Over the past decade,
the net worth of the top 400 billionaires in this
country has doubled by an astronomical $1 trillion
in the last 10 years.

In a moment
I will discuss the extraordinary political power of
the Koch brothers, a family investing very heavily
in the political process, spending hundreds and
hundreds of millions of dollars to elect rightwing
candidates who will protect the interests of the
wealthy and the powerful.

To give
some idea of what is going on in this economy,
everybody should understand that Charles and David
Koch--the Koch brothers--are the second wealthiest
family in this country. In the last year alone, this
one family saw a $12 billion increase in their
wealth, bringing their total wealth to $80 billion.

The other
day in the Washington Post there was an article
talking about the Adelson primary. When we talk
about a political primary, what it means is we have
candidates in the Democratic Party and the
Republican Party competing against each other to get
the support of the people in their respective
parties. Well, forget about that. That is old news.
Now the goal is to appeal to one multibillionaire so
this individual can contribute hundreds of millions
of dollars into the campaign. This is what is going
on right now in the Republican Party.

While the
wealthiest are doing phenomenally well, while the
United States today has the most unequal
distribution of wealth and income of any major
country on Earth, and while that income inequality
is worse today than at any time since 1928, what we
are also seeing is the collapse of the middle class
and an increase in poverty.

Since 1999,
the typical middle-class family has seen its income
go down by more than $5,000 after adjusting for
inflation. The typical middle-class American family
earned less income last year than it did 25 years
ago, back in 1989. The Presiding Officer is probably
the last person in the world I have to explain this
to, having written several books on this subject.

Why are
people angry in this country? The median male worker
in this country made $283 less last year than he did
44 years ago, and the typical female worker earned
$1,700 less than in 2007.

The
question I think every American should be asking is:
How does it happen, when we have a huge increase in
productivity--everybody has a cell phone, everybody
has a sophisticated computer, we have robotics in
all of our factories, we have a huge increase in
productivity--where is all of the wealth going which
increased productivity has created? The answer is
pretty clear: It has gone to the top 1 percent.

So the
moral issue we have to address as a nation is: Are
we comfortable as a nation in which in recent years
we have seen a huge increase in the number of
millionaires and billionaires, while at the same
time we have more people living in poverty than we
have ever had before?

This is an
incredible fact: As an aging nation with more and
more people reaching retirement, half of the
American people have less than $10,000 in their
savings accounts and in many ways have no idea how
they are going to retire with dignity. So the first
issue we have to deal with is a moral issue. Are we
comfortable living in a nation when so few have so
much while so many have so little, and so many of
our brothers and sisters--our fellow Americans--are
struggling economically every single day?

Today we
are addressing the issue of extending long-term
unemployment benefits. There are millions of workers
right now, including people who have worked their
entire lives and who no longer can find a job. They
have virtually no income coming in and are
struggling to survive. Single moms are trying to
raise families with very limited income. Is this the
nation we are comfortable being?

I don't
think we are. But it is not just an issue of
individual income. Today, corporate profits are at
an all-time high while wages are near an all-time
low.

Then when
we look at issues about how can we fund early
childhood education, how can we make sure every
American has health care as a right--how do we make
sure that when people lose their jobs they are going
to get the unemployment they need, we should
remember that every single year corporations--large,
multinational corporations--avoid paying at least
$100 billion a year in taxes because they stash
their cash in the Cayman Islands and other offshore
tax havens. The result is one out of four American
corporations pays nothing in Federal income taxes.
In fact, over the last 5 years, huge companies,
profitable companies, such as General Electric,
Boeing, and Verizon, pay nothing--zero--in Federal
income tax, even though all of those companies have
made a combined profit of $78 billion since 2008.

Here is the
irony of all ironies. It is one thing to understand
that the very wealthy are becoming wealthier while
everybody else is becoming poorer, but it is another
thing to understand that the people who have the
money, the billionaire class, are going to war
against working Americans. If one has $80 billion,
do they really need to invest in the political
process so they can elect candidates who will give
even more tax breaks? Do they really need to invest
in rightwing candidates who are out there trying to
cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the
Environmental Protection Agency, nutrition, food
stamps, and education? Why, if somebody has $80
billion, are they working so hard for more tax
breaks for themselves and for more cuts to the
middle class and working class in terms of programs
people desperately need?

Frankly, I
think this is not an economic issue. I think it is a
psychiatric issue. I think it is an issue which
suggests people are simply power hungry. They need
more and more. I think this is a very sad state of
affairs.

The
struggle we are engaged in now is stopping the
billionaire class from cutting Social Security, from
cutting Medicare, from cutting Medicaid, and from
preventing us from creating the millions of jobs our
economy desperately needs. But at the end of the
day, what we are really talking about is whether
this Nation is going to become an oligarchic form of
society, and what that means, what an oligarchic
form of society is about and which has existed in
many countries throughout the world,
historically--in many countries in Latin America,
although that has recently changed--is a nation in
which both the economics and politics of the nation
are controlled by a handful of very wealthy,
billionaire families. It doesn't matter what party
is in power because the real power economically and
politically rests with a billionaire class. It
clearly seems that unless we act boldly to reverse
this trend, we are seeing this country moving in
exactly that direction.

One of the
reasons is as a result of the disastrous Citizens
United Supreme Court ruling, which regards
corporations as people and allows the superwealthy
to spend as much as they want on elections. The
billionaire party, which is obviously aligned with
the Republicans, is now, in fact, the major
political force in this country. It is not the
Republican party, per se. It is not the Democratic
party, per se. It is the billionaire party led by
people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson.
They are the dominant political force in this
country because they can spend unbelievable sums of
money on elections. They can spend as much money as
they need, setting up think tanks and various
organizations which will support their extreme
rightwing point of view.

In the last
presidential election Barack Obama's campaign spent
a little bit over $1 billion. Mitt Romney spent
somewhere around there, maybe a little bit less, but
about $1 billion. The Koch brothers' wealth
increased by $12 billion in one year.

Is there
any reason to doubt that in the future this one
family will be able to spend more money on a
campaign than the presidential candidates
themselves, receiving donations from hundreds of
thousands of people? That is where we are today.
Where we are today is that the very foundations of
American democracy are being threatened by a handful
of incredibly wealthy people who are saying: You
know what. Eighty billion is not enough for me.
Yeah, I made $12 billion more than last year--not
enough for me. I have to have more, and I am going
to get more tax cuts for myself, and in order to do
that we may have to cut Social Security; we may have
to cut Medicare; we may have to cut Medicaid; we may
have to cut education for middle-class families.

We are in a
debate about whether we raise the minimum wage. My
view--and I know the Presiding Officer's view--is
that we should raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an
hour so that every working person in this country at
least--at least--can have a
minimal--minimal--standard of living. Many Americans
don't know that it is not just that virtually all
Republicans in the Congress are opposed to raising
the minimum wage. The truth is many of them want to
abolish the concept of the minimum wage.

The theory
of the minimum wage is that nobody should work for
below a certain wage. For many of my extreme
conservative friends, they think it would be
perfectly fine in a high unemployment area if we
abolish the minimum wage. People today are working
in this country for $3 and $4 an hour.

It is not
only economics. Many of these billionaires are
involved, as the Koch brothers are, in energy, in
oil. What they want to do is abolish agencies like
the Environmental Protection Agency so they can
pollute more and more and more. The scientific
community tells us in an almost unanimous fashion
that climate change is real, climate change is made
by human activity, climate change is already
creating problems in our country and around the
world, and that if we don't get our act together and
significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions, the
problems will only become worse. Yet you have
families such as the Koch brothers and other
energy-related billionaires spending huge sums of
money trying to confuse people about the reality of
climate change.

So to my
mind the issue that we have to focus on as a
Congress, the issue that we have to focus on as
American people is: What kind of nation do we wish
to live in? Do we want to live in a nation where a
handful of billionaires own a significant amount of
the wealth in this country while the middle class
has less and less, where families cannot afford to
send their kids to college or get decent childcare
for their little ones, where people are reaching the
age of 65 with virtually nothing in the bank in
order to provide a dignified retirement? Is that the
country we want to live in or do we want to see the
middle class grow and have a more equitable
distribution of wealth and income, a fairer tax
system where the millionaires and billionaires and
large corporations start paying their fair share of
taxes.

From a
political point of view, which is equally important:
Do we want to have a nation in which the concept is
one person, one vote; that we are all equal; that
you have as much say about what happens in
government as anybody else or do we want to have a
political system where a handful of billionaires can
sit around the room and say: OK, put $100 million
into that State. Let's put $50 million into that
State--where a handful of billionaires will
determine who gets elected President, who gets
elected Senator, who gets elected Governor, and have
Members of Congress crawling up to these
billionaires: What do you need, Mr. Billionaire? How
do I get the hundreds of millions of dollars you can
give me?

Is that
really what American democracy is supposed to be
about?

We have
some very fundamental issues we have to address as a
Congress. So I would suggest that we put on the
agenda the issue of distribution of wealth and
income and the implication of that grossly unfair
distribution of wealth and income that we have right
now.

With that,
Mr. President, I would yield the floor, and note the
absence of a quorum.

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